Prison Diaries: Poor Sanitation in the yard

Sanitation is very very poor. It is extremely difficult for inmates to get water to bath. Many of the inmates bath once in two or three days. A few people who have been there for long or have paid their way are able to bath twice daily or even once every day.

Sometimes the water doesn’t flow and the prisons authorities have to get water with a tanker. The same water serves every need in the prison.

Let’s talk about our toilets.

In this modern era, the Central prisons in Adum still uses squat holes. Inmates squat astride the holes adjacent each other to ease themselves. Sometimes the maggots that take over the place is a sight no one should see. But that’s what inmates have to contend with. It gets full very often…too often actually. I wish I could take a picture of these places to show…you will not watch it twice. When it gets full, the inmates are asked to go and drain it.

Inmates are made to evacuate the faeces when the manhole is full and the sanitation vehicle is not available. They open a certain channel and poor water on it, push it and allow it to run through the gutters of Adum. This usually happens in the night and on Saturdays and Sundays. Mind you, they do this with bare hands and sometimes shovels. During those nights, residents of Adum will testify to the bad stench that engulfs Adum.

The inmates are exposed to all form of health conditions due to poor sanitary conditions.

Where they cook our food is extremely dirty. The people who cook the food are very dirty. Palm fruits are left to rot…yet they will still use it to cook.

It is a wonder that we don’t have serious outbreaks there. The only thing i know that is rampant there is tuberculosis.

When the prisoners are locked up at 5, just wait for some thirty minutes and come close…the stench that will hit you will make you sick.

It is not as though the inmates cannot clean it but you will be shocked to know that detergents provided by government, corporate entities and other philanthropists are shared by the officers among themselves.

Sometime ago, about 12 drums of liquid soap was given to the prisons. A few days later, we went to ask for liquid soap to clean, we were told it was finished. How? The storekeeper and other officers had shared it and taken them home. These things were sent for the use of inmates.

So Thievery by officers is largely to be blamed for the poor sanitation in the prisons.

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This series is the real life experience of a young Ghanaian man who was sentenced to jail term of 4 years in the Kumasi Central Prison for a crime he insists he knows nothing of.

He was pardoned after serving 2 years and 20 days of that sentence in an amnesty.

This series seeks to bring to the fore occurrences within our prisons system that are mostly counterproductive to the correction of inmates and also highlight some of the inhuman treatments that occur there among a host of challenges that bedevil our prisons.